Two years ago in May, Marie and I said ‘let’s do this’ and launched a whirlwind four months of writing. Most weeks, we put down 10k words or more, and by the time October rolled around, we had a 225k word book draft for what would eventually become The Mask of Mirrors.
Last year in May, we got our first offer for the book and received an enthusiastic proto-response from the editor who made the offer we eventually accepted.
This year, we have a finalized book (at least, we’ve finished with the proofread pass and ARCs are coming soon), a new publication date of January 2021, and a cover debut and excerpt on io9.
After a winter hiatus for a whole rash of life stuff, we’re back into drafting book 2 and it’s shaping up to be so much fun. I’m looking forward to what next May’s updated will be.
A few weeks ago, I knocked out some masks for myself and my brother using t-shirts — because I have waaaay too many t-shirts. Copyedits for The Mask of Mirrors are turned it, and since I’m in the ranks of the Covid-19 unemployed, I have some free time to make more.
I don’t really need another mask for myself, but it occurred to me that other folks among my friends might want some. The masks I’m making are fairly simple. They’re not N95-certified or HEPA-compliant or anything that fancy. They’re just two layers of thick t-shirt cotton with cotton ties to go around the back of the head and neck. However, most of the reports I’m seeing indicate that these are still helpful for people doing necessary errands, etc.
They’re washable, which you’ll want to do on receipt (both for sterilization reasons and because I have a cat) and regularly as you use them, but with three masks, you can easily rotate them. So, let me know if you want me to make you some masks. Feel free to email me at alychelms@gmail.com with your request and shipping details.
Each t-shirt yields three masks — one plain and two with a portion of the t-shirt design. No charge, though if I get a lot of requests then I wouldn’t say no to folks Venmo-ing me a few bucks to cover packaging and postage. Depending on the response I get, I’ll probably churn out a bunch this weekend and do a single trip to the post office on Monday to send them out.
If you have a particular design you’d like, let me know. Designs available are on a first come, first serve basis. Base t-shirt color is listed in parentheses. I’ll update this list as designs are claimed — assuming I get any requests at all
Rigoletto (black)
Fox-o-Lantern (black)
Winter Fairy (navy)
Disney Princesses (grey)
Princess & Dragon (black)
Princess & Dragon (kelly green)
Fox Leafpile (kelly green)
Dragon & Phoenix (black)Claimed!
Story Dragon (navy)
Fire Dragon (black)
Distressed Flash (black)
Loki (black)
Mulan (black)
Wicked Witch & Flying Monkeys (black)
Unicorn Mermaid (bright blue)
Ursula 1 (black)
Ursula 2 (black)
Ursula 3 (black) Yes, I have a lot of Ursula t-shirts. And?
Last summer, I started working on a collaborative project with Marie Brennan that ended up being more or less NaNoWriMo for four months straight. We finished the 220k word behemoth in October, tossed it back and forth between beta readers, our agents, and each other, and sent it out to editors this past spring.
This week, we accepted a deal from Orbit Books to publish it as the first book of the Rook and Rose trilogy! It will be coming under the joint pen name M.A. Carrick (there’s a story there, but that’s for later).
I’m still working on my elevator pitch for the series, but here’s the general gist:
Alta Renata Viraudax is actually Arenza Lenskaya, a con artist who has infiltrated the nobility in an attempt to set herself up with a cushy life… only to run afoul of The Rook, a Dread-Pirate-Roberts-style vigilante whose mission is to oppose the nobility — including the increasingly visible Alta Renata. Capers, banter, double-crossing, and identity hijinks ensue. Think The Scarlet Pimpernel meets Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora series.
This was the most fun writing that I’ve ever had, and I think it shows on every page. Marie and I bring out the best in each other, and because we’re both anthropology worldbuilding geeks, we were able to create an incredibly rich, dense setting for us to play in. We’ve got multiple, inter-locking magic systems — Marie developed a whole divinatory card system that will definitely be Kickstarted so we can create an actual deck, and I got to get my ritual magic on by creating another system based on sacred geometry. There’s politics and economics, swashbuckling and derring-do, queerness and genderplay galore (because hell yeah there is), and so many fun characters that it hurts sometimes to do terrible things to them.
More news to come as this moves from editing into production! A little over a year ago, all we had was an idea. Now we have a book deal. Soon we’ll have a book! These things move faster than you think. I hope you’ll all come along with us for the ride.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with what has sort of become our unofficial theme song:
I’ve recently made passing mention to a super secret collaborative project I’m working on. I’ve been hesitant to say more because so often projects like this die before they ever get momentum.
However, after six-ish months of planning, plotting, and worldbuilding, and three weeks of intense writing that have already pushed us past the 25k point, I feel confident in saying this is a thing.
To get a feel for the flavor, listen to this:
Capers! Heroic vigilantes and antiheroes! Identity hijinks! Masquerades and mistaken identities! Romance and betrayal and rooftop assignations, all while wearing fabulous outfits!
So that’s what Marie Brennan and I are working on, if you can call it work. Writing with her is so much fun that I actively look forward to getting butt in chair every day.
Now that R&R (our code for it) is out of the bag, look for posts about collaboration, magic systems, clothing design, economic and political systems, folklore, civil engineering, and all the other fun things that come up when you knock two anthropologists together and tell them to design a world for fantasy intrigue.
